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FILM-TRIP
HORROR THAT LIVESVoodoo tripping
I Walked With a Zombie
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (Whale)
THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Wiene)
CAT PEOPLE (Tourneur)
DRACULA (Browning)
THE EXORCIST (Friedkin)
FRANKENSTEIN (Whale)
I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (Tourneur)
JAWS (Spielberg)
KING KONG (Cooper, Schoedsack)
NOSFERATU, THE VAMPIRE (Murnau)
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Julian)
PSYCHO (Hitchcock)
REPULSION (Polanski)
ROSEMARY'S BABY (Polanski)
THE SHINING (Kubrick)
VAMPYR (Dreyer)
THE WOLF MAN (Waggner)
Bride of Frankenstein
The Exorcist
VampyrWhen I first arranged categories for this site I coupled Horror with Sci-fi, based on the premise that science-fiction films, too, were often macabre and frightening. I'd reasoned that Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example, had more in common with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (everyday setting, regular people, even the birthing of weird life forms) than with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner which, like Body Snatchers, featured human-like creatures threatening life's very existence.
The line between the two genres blurred even further when I considered the Frankenstein films, with all their futuristic laboratories and pseudo science.
But in the end I made a distinction that some may consider arbitrary: the horror film is almost invariably tied to the supernatural an/or the occult, while sci-fi films (most more fiction than science) are rooted, however tenuously, in the possible. The fear or trembling we experience when seeing a good horror film is the fear of the unknown, perhaps the dread of an otherworldly retribution. I sense that the horror film plays on our suppressed desires and the resulting guilt we feel. Maybe that's why we enjoy them so much.
